Ball Lightning

It was already late when Gao Bo left. I turned off the light and lay down on my bed. Like every night recently, I entered a state of non-sleep, more exhausting than being awake, since the nightmares came one after another. They rarely repeated, but all of them shared the same background noise, the wailing of ball lightning in flight, like a lonely xun flute blowing endlessly in the wilderness.

A sound woke me. Deet. Just one brief note, but it stood out from the noise of my dream, and I was clearly aware that it came from non-dream reality. I opened my eyes and looked at the strange blue light enveloping the room. The light was dim and flickered occasionally, and rendered the ceiling cold and dark, like the roof of a tomb.

I sat up halfway and noticed that the light was coming from the LCD screen of my laptop, which was sitting on the table. That afternoon, as I was unpacking a travel bag I had been too lazy to open up for the many days I’d been back from the base, I found my old laptop and connected it to a network cable so I could go online. But when I pressed the switch, the screen remained black but for a few lines displaying an error message from the ROM self-check. Then I remembered that it was the machine I’d taken to the ball lightning weapons test exercise, and that its processor and memory had been torched by the ball lightning discharge, the CPU and two RAM sticks turned to ash. And so I just left it there and focused on other things.

But now the computer was running! A computer sans CPU and memory had started up! The Windows startup logo appeared on the screen. Then, with a soft clicking of the hard drive, the desktop popped up, the blue sky so empty and the meadow such a brilliant green that they seemed to belong to a strange other world, as if the LCD screen was a window onto it.

I forced myself out of bed and went to turn on the light, the violent shaking of my hands making it hard to reach the switch. The brief moment from when I flipped the switch until the light came flooding in felt like a suffocating eternity. The light snuffed out the weird blue, but did nothing to lessen the fear that gripped my whole body. I remembered the words Ding Yi had left me with when we parted: “If you come across anything, give me a call,” he had said, meaningfully, looking at me with that peculiar expression of his.

So I picked up the phone and dialed Ding Yi’s cell phone in a fluster. He was evidently not asleep, since the phone only rang once before he answered.

“Come to my place at once! The faster the better! It… it’s turned on. It’s running. I mean, the… the notebook computer is running….” I found it hard to be coherent, given the circumstances.

“Is this Chen? I’ll be right over. Don’t touch anything until I get there,” Ding Yi said in a voice that sounded perfectly calm.

After I set down the telephone, I looked back at the laptop. As before, it was quietly displaying the desktop, as if waiting for something. The desktop’s blue-green odd-eyed stare left me unable to remain in the room, so without even getting dressed, I went outside. The hall of the bachelors’ apartments was quiet enough to hear the snoring of my neighbor, and I felt much better and breathed more easily. I stood in the doorway and waited for Ding Yi to get there.

He arrived quickly. Ball lightning theoretical research was to be transferred to the Institute of Physics, so he had been in the city for the past few days in connection with that.

“Shall we go in?” he said, after a glance at the tightly closed door behind me.

“I… I won’t. You go in,” I said, turning aside to let him pass.

“It might be something incredibly simple.”

“Maybe for you. But me… I can’t take it anymore,” I said, pulling at my hair.

“I don’t know whether or not supernatural phenomena exist, but what you’ve seen is certainly not that.”

His words calmed me down a bit, like an adult’s hand grabbed by a child in the terrifying dark, or the firm ground beneath a drowning man’s feet. But this feeling immediately made me depressed. Before Ding Yi, my mind was weak; before Lin Yun, my actions were weak. I was such a fucking weakling—no wonder I placed after Ding Yi and Jiang Xingchen in Lin Yun’s heart. Ball lightning had molded me into this form; from that night of terror in my youth, the shape of my psyche had been determined. I was destined to live my whole life with a terror no one else could feel.

Biting the bullet, I followed Ding Yi into my room. Past his thin shoulder I saw that the computer on the table had entered screen saver mode, the star field. Then the screen went dark. Ding Yi moved the mouse and the desktop came up again. I had to avert my eyes from the strange grass.

Ding Yi picked up the computer and, after inspecting it, passed it to me. “Take it apart.”

“No.” I pushed it aside. When I made contact with its warm case, my hand jerked back as if shocked. Something about it felt alive.

“Fine. I’ll take it apart. You look at the screen. And find a Phillips screwdriver.”